The traditional processes for provisioning, installation, test and turn-up of transport equipment on customer premises (known as customer premise(s) equipment CPE) are complex, often involving coordination between the customer or an installer, and a network operator that uses one or more operations support systems (OSSs) to provision the customer premise and network equipment, initiate tests and activate the service. In addition, the OSSs that support this activity are typically developed by and customized for the specific vendor equipment that is deployed on customer premise and in the network. Developing new OSSs is a time consuming and expensive process for network service providers. This situation makes it difficult for network service providers to deploy new types of customer premise equipment, since each new customer premise equipment type typically requires new software development in the OSSs. In addition, the provisioning, installation, test and turn-up process itself is slow and expensive due to the complexity of the processes described above.
Transport equipment and OSS have traditionally not been developed to support a plug and play model of operation, since this equipment has in the past been based on Time-Division Multiplex (TDM) protocols that do not readily allow types of protocol exchanges required for automated CPE provisioning to take place. However, as transport networks evolve to support packet switching, this traditional limitation need not apply. One embodiment of a transport network that can support a plug and play model of provisioning is the Packet Aware Transport Network (PATN) Architecture that is the subject of a US patent application filed on Mar. 26, 2004 with Ser. No. 10/810,326, which is herein incorporated by reference.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for supporting automated “plug and play” provisioning to be extended to include transport CPE in the PATN Architecture.